The 2012 Election Will Look Cheap Compared To 2016.

You will recall during the Republican Primary period there was tension between those who said, “We must chose someone who can beat Obama,” and those who said, “We must chose someone who is against abortion and gay marriage.”

In the Republican Primary season three years from now, the question will be, “How do we pretend we never had any interest in gays and abortion?” Now, some Republican super pacs are preparing swamp the primaries and crowd out anti abortion/gay Presidential candidates.

It will require a lot of money. The Obama campaigns were labor intensive with an army of telephone and door to door workers. They were volunteers or low paid students.

There is no secret to how it is done so Republicans can do the same. They might have to have more salaried staff, but my guess is super pacs can come up with whatever is needed.

The first labor intensive task would be to have people reading millions of social media posts. Each time someone posts some complaint about Obama or something positive about less government, the author would be tracked down.

When the primaries come around, the pacs will hire another army of people to staff offices in every county of every state. This army will be on the phones calling the social media posters and turning out primary voters for the no-mention-abortion-or-gays candidate selected by the pacs by that time.

There will be a parallel program trying to get Hispanics to forget the party’s love for deporting immigrants.

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9 Responses

Steve

How about instead of putting all this money into getting their candidate into office they donate all this money towards the national debt?? For every dollar you donate to your candidate you donate a dollar towards the debt.

It makes no sence at all. In a debt based economy you cannot pay off the debt since one man’s debt is another man’s asset. Its a zero sum game. Stop going into debt and the whole system collapses. Its a self destructing system. It has to collapse.

How about:
A stranger arrives at a small town and looks at the local motel thinking to stay the night.
He leaves a fifty dollar deposit with the owner.
The owner runs out and pays the butcher the fifty that he owes him.
The butcher pays his debt to the local lady of the night who gives it to the motel owner for room rent that she owes.
The stranger decides he doesn’t like the room or the town, takes his money back and leaves town.

Jon: I believe you are on the right track. Although I believe that marriage is only between a woman and a man, Republicans are going to have to make concessions to regain office. Rather than letting our debt balloon and stay on a path to financial crisis worse than Europe, rather than letting our kids and grandchildren “pay our tab” for unwise spending, and rather than working until July 1st until one starts to take home money for themselves versus the current May 1st (it’s called Federal tax rate increases), we may have to say “yes it’s OK for you guys to get married.” At least there won’t be more dependents on the new health care plan for us to pay for….

Steve’s suggestion does make sense. What he suggests is that you simply make a match donation to Uncle Sam. If Uncle Sam receives excess cash, it has liquidity to borrow less and payoff debt early. What if everyone paid an extra $1,000 beyond their normal tax due on April 15th? Same concept only a political campaign donation would essentially require an extra contribution. Governemnt would need to ensure those dollars received go towards early debt retirement, not to expand programs and spending. So the excess cash would essentially go to China (early).

Money donated to a campaign is still in the economy. Money used to pay off debt goes to foreighn investors (mostly central banks), to the Fed, or to domestic banks. it is gone for good. Government deficit spending is an important part of the economy, unfortunetly. If you balance the budget it would throw the economy into deep recession/depression, throwing millions out of work. It is way too late to save this economy. It is now a self- destructing system. Deal with it.

Michael 10:02 “Money used to pay off debt goes to foreign investors (mostly central banks), to the Fed, or to domestic banks. It is gone for good.”

This isn’t my particular fied of economics, but some of what you say is accurate, some probably not. Certainly, some of our national debt is owned by forigner people and banks. When we pay them back, the dollars go somewhere, mostly indirectly ending up back here. For domestic banks, federal government securities are better for banks’ safty than loans to private people.

While our national debt is high in dollar terms, it is well within our economy’s ability to handle. The real problem caused by national debt is it allows political people to spend without discipline. Stopping its growth during this period would be an accomplishment.

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Jon Lindgren taught economics at North Dakota State University and was mayor of Fargo for 16 years. He belongs to the Red River Freethinkers and Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers.
Freethinking is hundreds of years old. Freethinking is about deciding independently rather than accepting the dogma of religious or civic authorities.